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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29779269">the eyelessness of paul beaufort</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/esnoyuuutsu/pseuds/esnoyuuutsu'>esnoyuuutsu</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>A3! (Video Game)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Eye Horror, Gen, everyone else is mentioned in some capacity, gekka au, mildly based off lucid theatre kg, of some kind</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-03-01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-03-01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-16 02:06:41</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,366</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29779269</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/esnoyuuutsu/pseuds/esnoyuuutsu</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Statement of Tsuzuru Minagi, on the behaviour of a member of his theatre company.</p><p>// yes this is some kinda magnus archives au. no i'm not going to explain the context of the fic itself.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Minagi Tsuzuru &amp; Miyoshi Kazunari</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>13</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>the eyelessness of paul beaufort</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>i'm so sorry.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Statement of Tsuzuru Minagi, on the behaviour of a member of his theatre company. Original statement given December 28th, 2020. Recording by December, research assistant at the ██████ Organisation, March 1st, 2021.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Statement begins.</span>
  </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>It started when our company, Mankai Company, was doing a special performance. Everyone working together instead of separated by their usual troupes, and all as characters from different plays we’d done before. Miyoshi-san was playing his character from Captain Sky’s Pirates, a naval officer who defects to the pirate crew.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I’ve known him for longer than the rest of our company, and Miyoshi-san—Kazunari Miyoshi—he’s always been kinda weird, I think. But the normal kind of weird. The, doesn’t know people’s boundaries and is a little too friendly, kind of weird. I write the scripts, and I come up with all the original plays myself, but I definitely wouldn’t be able to do it without the other actors’ input. His influence has always made his characters a little...out there, like Aladdin trying to take selfies in the middle of the play, or a ninja talking like your usual party boy.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But this was...different.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It seemed like a nonsensical offhand joke, at first. “What if Paul didn’t have any eyes?” He laughed when I grimaced at him, telling me to lighten up. Apparently, Tsukioka-san had believed him when he’d said he dropped his eyes on the floor, and it amused Miyoshi-san so much he decided to keep it going.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was kind of a running joke after that, here and there. Sometimes Miyoshi-san would add in the other pirates, saying their captain didn’t have a face, or the navigator had hands where his eyes should’ve been, but for the most part it was just Paul. Ikaruga-san and Muku, who played those two, would mostly respond with some variation of amusement or slight horror respectively, but everyone would just...go with it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Once, I walked backstage to find Miyoshi-san still in costume, in an animated discussion with Banri on the specifics of the harvesting and preservation of...eyeballs. Banri was so absorbed into his character as a mad scientist that he’d gotten carried away as well, not minding in the slightest the light on Miyoshi-san’s face, the rapt furor with which he described every detail. I could see Arisugawa-san starting to go pale, though horror and gore don’t usually give him pause, and I was getting uneasy as well. Eventually, Mikage-san and Furuichi-san joined us, and Miyoshi-san stopped.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I could still see that...fascination in Miyoshi-san’s expression as he smiled innocently at the two of them when they asked what was going on. Nothing, don’t worry about it~! he said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Now, I work in theatre, and I live with 23 other actors. It’s not like I’m not used to people getting too into character—I can’t tell you how many times someone’s nearly gotten injured from fight scenes getting out of hand, or been called by the wrong name because rehearsals had gone on for too long. I'm a writer too, so I'm no stranger to dreaming up things that might be concerning outside of the context of writing fiction. My own Internet search history would probably have people staring at me the way that I would at Miyoshi-san every time he brought the eye stuff up.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Something just felt...off, about the whole thing. He used to be the outgoing type. Always inviting people out—me, the other university students in our dorm, even jokingly asking our director on dates a couple times. He liked being out in the city lights, in the company of others.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>After that performance, the second he got home, he’d go upstairs and hole up in his room. At first, I thought that he was working on school stuff—he’s an art major, so sometimes he’d just lock himself in his room to paint when finals were coming up. But then, Muku, his roommate, started getting worried because Miyoshi-san would never let him turn on the lights. Said he was fine with them off.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>That didn’t mean he </span>
  <em>
    <span>wasn’t</span>
  </em>
  <span> painting, though. Somehow, even with the curtains drawn and all the lights switched off, Miyoshi-san would manage to fill canvases and canvases with his reimaginings of the Sky Pirates crew.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I have no problems with different interpretations of my work—after all, some of my plays are derived from existing works anyway. And like I said, without the other actors in our company, I wouldn’t be able to finish the plays at all.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I wasn’t surprised at the quality of the paintings—he’s a really good artist, honestly. But this terrible ghostly crew, with their hollow eye sockets and blank faces—as if they were not only pirates, but a cursed ship, haunting the seas—they were so unnerving, I couldn’t even bring myself to tell him so, though I normally have no problem letting Miyoshi-san know when he’s taking something too far.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He even got into trouble with Furuichi-san once. Miyoshi-san does all the graphic design work for any of the theatre business, so he’s in charge of posters and flyers and stuff like that. When the flyers were almost about to get sent off for printing with all the eyes edited out...Furuichi-san nearly lost it. He told Miyoshi-san to fix it and cut the bullshit out if he didn’t want to get thrown out on the street. Everyone knew he wasn’t going to follow through, but Miyoshi-san fixed it anyway. I think he still does have the printouts without the eyes somewhere in his room, though. Not that I want to check.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The one time I caught Miyoshi-san outside of his room in the evening, he was sitting at the living room table, sketching furiously. I greeted him, surprised to see him under the flickering electric lights.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>When he turned to say hello, I swear his eyes were gone. Just...empty sockets.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I blinked, a strangled noise in my throat, and then he was fine. The same green eyes staring back at me—if anything, they almost seemed too bright.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I’m not crazy. I’m sure I’m not. If I ever asked anyone else in the house, they’d laugh it off, tell me that I was being paranoid and I needed to get more sleep. I’m not going to say they didn’t have a point—between part-time jobs, college, and writing full-length plays, my sleep schedule is basically nonexistent. But I am </span>
  <em>
    <span>sure</span>
  </em>
  <span> that I’m not just imagining it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this if I didn’t think you guys could help me. That’s your whole thing, right? Researching spooky paranormal stuff so that it can be...stopped. Otherwise, what would be the point.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Miyoshi-san...I’ve never really said this to him, but he’s probably one of my closest friends. Everyone in the company is like a second family to me. I’d do anything for them. So...please...do something. Please. Because I think it isn’t just Miyoshi-san anymore. Muku’s started to get too comfortable in that dark room of theirs. All the rest of their troupe, too. The entirety of Summer, plunged into darkness.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I’ve stopped staying up so late. My mom always used to tell me that if I kept sitting in my room with the lights off, staring at a screen, I’d go blind. I guess it’s about time I listened to her.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Statement ends.</span>
  </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>...well, this is pretty hard to follow up on, especially since Tsuzuru himself says he’s prone to paranoia and sleep deprivation. Apparently April already had Alice ask for another few interviews, but Tsuzuru said that he’d overreacted and that everything’s fine. The other company members declined to comment, since they didn’t really notice anything was wrong.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The only other thing out of the ordinary is that a month or so after the statement was given, a complaint on Mankai dorm’s electric bill was made by Syu Otomiya. He asked why they were still taking money from his account if every time he passed by the dormitory, even if there were people inside, the lights were always out.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Turns out the electricity was working fine—they were all just perfectly content in the dark.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Recording ends.</span>
  </em>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>special thanks to libel (the aforementioned kazu), miyu (tsumugi), qwerty (banri), mori (the original tsuzuru), skye (hisoka), ryu (muku), wonder (sakyo), everyone in ltkg, and everyone who encouraged me in my brief possession while making this thing!</p><p>no, i still won't explain what the fuck is going on here. find me at @esnoyuuutsu if you like</p></blockquote></div></div>
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